Felt nothing for the characters. Didn't care about them. The voice of the narrator would change, but it was confusing as to who it was. Took a few paragraphs sometimes to tell that the voice had changed. Didn't finish.

3.5 stars, really. Flawed but lots of interesting ideas.

If you're a fan of Ms. Ozick's you won't be disappointed. In fact I think this is her most complete novel yet. Her gift for story, the moral issues that drive her narrative and her stunning lyricism are here in full force.

After reading this, I agreed with several other Goodreads reviewers that it was disappointing, especially in light of Ann Patchett's cover endorsement. There were some clever lines, but overall, I didn't care about the main characters (although some of the minor ones that were killed off early were quite entertaining) and found the plot to be plodding.

I knew of Ozick from her essay writing and found this book in a local used bookstore. I was taken with the story, which is something I really look for in my fiction, something I can escape into, and I was perplexed by her characters. Her main character in particular served as a lens rather than a moving part of the machine, she seemed to let everything happen. This could be very frustrating, unless the real meat of the book is the strange alchemy of the other characters. Ozick plays with war, family, class, and intellectualism. At times all characters seem despicable--which I found refreshing. It is a WWII story that will not remind you of any of the rest of the millions of WWII stories that you have already read.

I don't remember whether I officially put Heir to the Glimmering World on my to-be-read list when I read a review from Powell's (if you're a big reader and you need new suggestions for reading material, get on the powells.com review-a-day email. They cull reviews from good periodical sources like Esquire, Vanity Fair, Atlantic Monthly, etc. and I probably end up with several new must-reads every month, and forward others to people I think would be interested), but I remembered the title when I saw it on the library bookstore's shelf, which indicates I was at least intrigued by the review.

Regardless of the absence of a compelling plotline, Cynthia Ozick's writing grabs you and pulls you into this tale of displaced people in 1930s New York - primarily the narrator, a young woman badly raised by a ne'er-do-well father and eventually fobbed off on a relative, who does right by her until his own choices squeeze her out, sending her off to a questionable and ill-defined position in the household of an immigrant family of scholars. They have been forced from their homeland by the Nazi regime and now depend on the largesse of an unseen (at least for the first third of the book) and erratic benefactor who as a little boy was the unwitting and eventually unwilling star of his father's series of children's books.

The book is about choices (often the lack of them), and obsessions, and denial, and the freedom money gives you, and caretakers, and ultimately I can't say I really *liked* it. Once the framework of the story had been laid down, I found too much repetition of particular themes: the benefactor's resentment of his twisted childhood; the mother's ebb and flow from function to dysfunction to function again, fed by different characters' willingness or ability to coddle her; the poorly fleshed-out, nearly interchangeable sons who dash through the scene and make inappropriate and pointless comments to the narrator. Ultimately, all are left in a sort of limbo, subject to the influence of next person who is injected into this motley group, and not really going anywhere.

It's really 2.5. This is a weird book but I wanted to finish it.